Nice overview! Here’s another useful tip: to make dd output it’s progress, open up another terminal window and enter “killall -USR1 dd”. As with anything using kill or killall, make sure you type it correctly before hitting enter.

Check your output file destination. If you just want to create the file in your current directory, simply use of=MBR.image. You may also need to run the command as root. Some distro won’t report any privilege error.

One kind hint
I have two disk images.
One is partial and covers the first 50% of a drive called “hdd A” (320GB), let’s call that partial image “disk-A-img1.bin”
Next I have “disk-A-img2.bin”, which is 100% image of the same “hdd A” but contains many damaged sectors, especially in the first 50%.
The goal I’d like to achieve is to use dd to overwrite the initial part of “disk-A-img2.bin” with the bytes contained in “disk-A-img1.bin”.
Is it as simple as providingdd if=/tmp/disk-A-img2.bin of=/disk-A-img1.bin or are they required some more parameters?
I ask this since I’m worrying about the file disk-A-img1.bin to be truncated at the size of disk-A-img2.bin, while as described above, disk-A-img1.bin is required to remain it original size 320GB.
Thank you for hinting
Frank